This service was designed to make it cheap and immediate to add voice to an existing chatbot deployment – and it does that, but as an interesting side effect it also lowers the cost of new voicebot developments, while speeding up their deployment time.

Why is that? It all comes down to the dynamics of the conversational AI market for enterprise customers.

A successful conversational AI project entails more than just software and communications. It needs to be tailored to the company’s workflow, products and services, and lingo. Often, the type of language that needs to be used is not the same as in a general-purpose conversation, and this requires conversational applications to be trained to better support it. Of course, this is a common requirement in this type of project, and conversational AI platforms support language customization. But it still means that project development, testing, refining, and deployment take substantial time and effort.

Now, there are only so many conversational AI vendors offering voice integration, and system integrators who can use their platform to implement projects. In addition to the conversational AI part, a voice-enabled project includes integration with the telephone network or the corporate PBX, insertion into the IVR flow, and integration with the voice path in the contact center – both to forward calls if the virtual assistant cannot service them completely, and to provide call-associated data to human agents to make their work easier and provide better service.

All this requires specialized expertise, which few vendors have. These companies and people are in high demand, so delays can be long and costs high. 

But PhoneMyBot provides a ready alternative, with its pre-integrated voice channels. It includes telephone network and WhatsApp connectivity, and APIs to transfer calls to other voice endpoints (for instance, a contact center queue). Interactive Media has tons of experience integrating with the most common contact center suites both to insert the virtual assistant into the IVR flow and to send data attached to calls to the human agent who is servicing it.

This means that the pool of vendors that can bid on a voice-enabled conversational AI project is suddenly much bigger. Even companies with little or no voice expertise can now deliver a high-quality omnichannel virtual assistant: they only need to test their PhoneMyBot integration and iron out any small wrinkle that the additional channel may create in their conversational application strategy.

There are many more text-only conversational AI offers than voice-enabled ones. PhoneMyBot opens the omnichannel market to them, which benefits vendors, their customers, and ultimately the customer experience that you and I receive when we call a customer service line.